How To Thicken A Curry Sauce That is Too Runny – Quickly

Have you ever found yourself cooking up a curry and then realized that the sauce is going to end up way too runny?

For years I have been thickening my curries by adding cornflour. To do this I normally add a couple of teaspoons of cornflour into a small bowl on the side. Then I mix it up with water and add the mixture to the curry. Instant fix!

The other day however, I had a problem.

I was out of cornflour.

Luckily , there is more than one way to thicken a curry sauce and here are some other methods:

Thickening curry with tomato paste or a puree

There are many vegetables, that can be pureed into a sauce that can be used to help thicken the consistency of your curry. Some examples that you could use:

Onions

Lentils

tomatoes

How To thicken a curry sauce with yoghurt

Heres the thing.. sometimes you just need a fix in a real hurry, and one super quick method is just to add some plain yoghurt.

You don’t want it to curdle though so make sure you:

Don’t have the heat up too much

Use whole milk/high fat yoghurt

Add it last after the curry is already cooked and cooled down a bit

Flour to make sauce less runny

Not everyone has cornflour in their cupboard, but most people do have plain old flour. You can whip up a bit of flour and water, maybe add some butter if you like, and before you know it your curry will have the consistency of a thick soup.

Mash up that potato

If you mash up potato enough it becomes like mush when mixed with liquid. If you are planning on having some spud in your curry anyway you might as well use it to it’s best advantage and kill two birds with one stone.

Simmer it off

The final technique I am going to share with you is one of the simplest. This is approaching the problem from a different angle.

If you don’t want to add a thickener to increase the thickness, what you can do is remove some of the runniness in the sauce and to do this just remove the lid and let it simmer for a while.

What if my curry is now too thick?

Unfortunately some of these methods can occasionally work too well.

More than once I have been stuck in a loop of thicken, thin, thicken, thin until finally I have managed to get it to the perfect consistency.

To thin it out a bit is really simple – just add a little bit of water.

Do you have any other methods that you use to thicken a curry that you would like to share? Let us know.